DAC + Headphone AMP + Dedicated Soundcard possible with Headphones?

Simca has a pretty great guide to recommend some combinations: http://www.overclock.net/t/1014902/most-commonly-recommended-audio-products

Not sure if your a bit confused or just over-engineering your plans - a DAC, or a sound card are both the same thing essentially - a source.

I'm really dumb when it comes to this, but i'll try to explain a bit from what I've read over the years.

There is a DAC (Digital Analog Converter) chip on the sound card that takes ur digital audio data and converts it into an analog signal that can be played by speakers/headphones. A DAC needs a digital source from either your computer (ie: PCI/PCI-E expansion card), Optical Out (toslink), Coax Out, USB, or some hybrid converter consisting of some combination of the above transports.

Basically, you can get away with either a soundcard, OR a DAC, since they are essentially serving the same role. I would personally recommend that latter since your going to be able to isolate your power supply for your audio from your PC. The only sound card I've had that didnt have noise on the analog outputs was the Xonar STX because of it's integrated faraday cage.

I would suggest running a DAC either off the digital output from your onboard sound (toslink/coax), or buying one that also supports USB. With USB, your DAC is now your soundcard in Windows and doesnt require the use of your onboard sound as a digital transport. Most of the time you don't even need drivers - Windows 7 handles it for you.

At that point you can use any combination of powered speakers, headphones, amps, etc.

If your dead set on the positional cues of the Creative Z, you could potentially find a way to run the line out from that into a small AMP (if it's really even needed for what your trying to do), or see if the positional cues are passed on if you use the toslink output from the soundblaster Z. I personally don't have much patience for creative drivers though, they are very hit/miss (along with several other notable sound card manufacturers).

I never found the positional benefits of using a gaming card to do anything tbh, in many many years of fps gaming. Half of it is gimmick because they are just giving you a better audio source device, which definitely helps, and the other half is mainly just EQ/Enhancements to the audio channel to help isolate directions. Some of it works to an extent and some of it doesnt, but in the end its really just affecting sound quality. I would not recommend that sound card if half of your purpose was to listen to music or watch HD movies.

As you said, you want positional cues through headphones. That means dolby headphone (is there a DTS equivalent to this? I don't know), which is basically an effects processor that puts positonal cues into a 2 channel output.

It's possible, on my Xonar D2X, to output the dolby headphone treated sound via either analog (through the jacks on the soundcard itself) or SPDIF digital output to an external DAC.

I don't think you need a DAC - the DACs on a good sound card are really rather good (the DAC chips on my D2X are better than most sub $1000 DACs), and unless you are planning on spending $2000 on a pair of headphones, I really doubt you'd get any benefit from an external DAC, provided you are using a decent soundcard.

You can, as someone else said, use just a DAC and use the motherboard digital output to feed it, but I expect you will find that the motherboard sound chip can't do dolby headphone, probably because of the licensing cost. Whether or not you can get DACs that do dolby headphone, I don't know.

If you did use just a DAC, then you would need a headphone amp. Using a sound card, the headphone amp is built into the sound card. Sure, you could use the line-level outputs from the sound card (assuming you buy a card that has line level outputs) and feed them into an external headphone amplifier, but again - unless you buy very high-end headphones, you'll find that the amp on a top of the range soundcard is really very good - good enough that you don't need anything else with "good" headphones.

So the best solution for you would probably be a good quality sound card, and some nice headphones, I have a Xonar D2X and Sennheiser PC360 G4ME headphones, and for gaming they are absolutely outstanding. Music - meh, they are OK, in fact they are the best headphones I've ever heard, but I have pretty good stereo speakers and compared to proper speakers they aren't so great, but I expect that even applies to really expensive headphones just because of the restrictions of size and weight.

EDIT: It occured to me to mention head-fi.org to you, then I just noticed this thread: http://www.head-fi.org/t/633226/best-way-to-get-dolby-headphone-dac-amp-that-accepts-dolby-digital-live-also-usb-dac-amp-with-dolby-headphone-support

It seems that Dolby Headphone is much better than the creative alternative, but it seems like something called CMSS-3D (which I've never heard) did the same as Dolby Headphone, but is not in the newer creative cards. I'd tread carefully, and do your research thoroughly.

I also note that someone brought up the important point in that head-fi.org thread, that a DAC won't give any gaming support (won't support the EAX/DirectSound stuff that games do). That's pretty important, so I'd definitely veer away from a DAC if I were you.

The Xonars don't do EAX in hardware (I think because of a licensing issue) but they do emulate it in the driver in such a way that it makes no difference - they basically fully support it, and on modern hardware, the processing load of it being done by the CPU rather than natively on the sound card is totally insignificant.

I'd look at the Xonar cards, because last I looked, Creatives drivers were appalling.

Get thee to head-fi.org
Edited by BorisTheSpider - 11/7/12 at 1:17pm

Well DACs are kind of a personal preference - they are a lot of the reason why say some people love or hate particular high-end CD players or whatever - they have a distinctive sound.

The D2X uses Burr-Brown PCM1796 which are in the $7,000 Denon AVP-A1 Pre-Pro and $5,200 AVR-5308, so it's not really a matter of "better" once you get above real budget gear - DAC chips themselves are not particularly expensive, the rest of the analog output stages are more important so that's what's improved in expensive separate DACs, as well as the shielding, power supply circuitry etc. A lot of the price is marketing bunk - I used to be really into hifi, and I've heard a lot of stuff - tons of it is _much_ more expensive than it has any right to be, and is sold based purely on snake-oil and snobbery. I have a Musical Fidelity power amp here that unfortunately I can't make use of right now, but the thing cost me like £1000 about 10 years ago, and I know for a fact I've never heard anything better, so yeah, maybe a £10,000 amp is "better" but I expect mostly it's just different, and more fitting to someones personal taste. Speakers are the same - I have heard systems worth say £20,000 and they were no better than a pair of £3000 active monitors I once heard in a real pro-audio store, and that's my take on it now - even though I haven't brought any new hifi in years and years, if I ever needed to again, I'd go to a pro-audio store instead, where stuff is sold on performance rather than looks and brand name.

External headphone amps are going to make a difference, but again it's whether the speakers/headphones can reveal a difference. I personally notice no difference going through the headphone output on a good (but quite old) 5.1 receiver, vs plugging the headphones in directly to the sound card. I expect a proper headphone amp would probably be noticably better, but honestly not by a lot - I see your headphones are in a similar price range to mine, and I just don't think we have good enough cans to actually benefit from high-end amps. I'm not trying to do your headphones down (or mine) but realistically they are only one or two steps above the level of being "bad" even though they are _much_ better than stuff half the price, and it's a matter of diminishing returns, since stuff twice the price is not twice as good. So yeah, I do actually think you might notice a difference with an external amp, but you'd have to spend proper headphone amp money, say $250, and I don't think you'd get $250 worth of improvement.

I reckon if you go into the $1000 to $2000 range on the cans, then of course dropping $500 or $1000 on a really nice headphone amp is going to make a night-and-day difference from plugging into a $200 PC sound card, but I really doubt it's worth it with headphones that are still at the "gamer" end of the market, rather than being true hi-fi phones.

If you do want to get a headphone amp, I can recommend Musical Fidelity in general for amps. They have always made really nice, no-frills stuff that is just built like 5x better than anything else at the same price point - the money goes into the components and not a bunch of marketing and snake-oil. I know they made a headphone amp years ago that was really well regarded, but I can't remember the name of it, it's probably available nice and cheap second-hand now.

Really, it comes down to the quality of the analog output stages of whatever sound card you buy. I doubt, given that you seem willing to get a pretty good gamer-level card, that what you buy will be "bad", but obviously there will be some variation and some cards will be better than others in this regard. If the analog output stages on the card are already pretty good, then an external amp is going to be hard pushed to do noticably better through mid-range headphones.

I think I'm going to have to defer here though to others who have used a sensibly/proportionately priced headphone amp with sub $500 headphones, but I will say that using my PC360s with the D2X, I'd be surprised if there was much more quality to be squeezed out by using a separate headphone amp, since what's on the card seems pretty good and seems to me like it's probably getting the best out of my cans that can be got.

Having a good DAC chip doesn't mean anything if the design/circuitry is poor.

Likewise if you have a good design, it'll sound great even with a lower end DAC chip.

Not that the 1796 is poor.

Let's start over from basics...

To get sound out of a computer, you need some digital audio data sent out to some device with a DAC. This device with a DAC chip takes the digital audio information and converts that into an analog signal, a voltage, that changes over time in a way that matches what the data is. That's the D/A (digital-to-analog) conversion, done by the Digital-to-Analog Converter. This signal is buffered by an amplifier. The amplifier multiplies this signal from the DAC (can be by a large amount, could be by something under 1.0 so it's more like dividing, to make it smaller) and drives the headphones or speakers with it.

In some devices like onboard audio, the DAC and amp duties are all handled by a single chip. Why can some DACs and amplifiers sound a little different? We're looking at analog systems, which always have some imperfections. In the real world, you can't get a device with no noise. You can't make something that does y(t) = 2 * x(t), where y(t) is the output and x(t) is the input. It will be off by a certain amount, in certain situations, in different conditions. There will be some imperfections; some try to mitigate these and make them as small as possible, others deliberately make some changes. So for a given stream of digital audio information, the sound quality is determined by the analog portions of the signal chain: the DAC, amplifier, headphones / speakers, ears. Mostly the latter two in most situations, because the electronics portions can be done cheaply these days at a very high quality.


A sound card has a DAC and integrated amplifier. If you use the sound card's DAC, you are not using anything else's DAC. However, it is possible to use a sound card (and any of its features you're not interested in like EAX, CMSS-3D, Dolby Headphone, or whatever it does in drivers or hardware) by having the sound card pass out digital information via S/PDIF to an external DAC device with S/PDIF input. In that case, the external device is doing D/A, and you connect an amplifier to that. That bypasses the sound card's DAC, because the sound card is not responsible for doing the D/A conversion.

If you're not using any EAX, CMSS-3D, Dolby whatever, etc., and don't need inputs, there's little motivation to get a sound card over a dedicated DAC-only device. A dedicated external DAC device can do everything you want. Definitely there's no motivation to get both, because you wouldn't be using the sound card for anything. However, because of mass production, internal sound card prices are often good; it's no problem if you want to buy a sound card to use for D/A and run that to a dedicated headphone amplifier.

The good thing about most external audio devices is that most running USB can run on the OS's default UAC drivers. i.e. you don't need to rely on buggy drivers. They're also isolated somewhat from all the electrically-noisy internals of a computer. Latency is not an issue for consumer use. Jitter is rarely an issue these days.

The analog and power supply sections are equally as important as the DAC chip used when it comes to it's overall sound quality.

Yeah, if you were going to run an external DAC and amp, the only reason for a sound card would then be that it could do stuff like EAX, Dolby Headphone, equalisation etc. If you have a decent onboard sound card that can do what you need in it's software (in terms of EQ, dolby headphone etc.) then you don't need a separate card, and since all you'd be doing is outputting a digital stream over SPDIF there would be no quality difference anyway.

So say you're playing a game that has 5.1 output, you set that up to output to the soundcard, and the card (plus its drivers) work on that 6 channel input, doing EQ, Dolby headphone or whatever, and the card outputs a downmixed stream to 2 channels via a digital output. That then goes to the DAC which turns that digital stream into a line-level analog output (2 channels) which then goes to the headphone amp to be amplified to a level suitable to feed the cans.

If you use a soundcard plus amp without a DAC, the process is the same as above except the DAC stage happens inside the soundcard itself, and it outputs the line level 2 channel feed directly to the headphone amp.

If you're just using a soundcard, all the stages happen on the card.


Looking at the ODAC you linked to, it looks like that is basically an external soundcard, since it mentions using mini-usb for input. So that bypasses/replaces any onboard sound card (or separate sound card) and would show up in windows as a device in device manager. I have no idea what software they'd provide or what functions you'd have under windows in terms of controlling it.

The type of DAC I'm referring to above wouldn't take a USB input, rather it would take either an optical SPDIF or a coaxial digital input (from a soundcard or onboard sound) and convert that digital stream to line-level analogue.

The difference of course is that with the second type, the sound card (and software functions available with it) are separated from the digital-to-analogue conversion process. In the first (ODAC) type, it looks like an all-in-one solution and you'd need to look at what software control it had and what standards (like dolby headphone etc.) it could do.
Edited by BorisTheSpider - 11/9/12 at 10:48am